The financial crises in emerging markets in 1997-1999 were preceded by financial liberalisation, rapid surges in capital inflows, increased levels of indebtedness, and then sudden capital outflows. The study contains four essays that extend the different generations of crisis literature and...

We investigate the effects of credit ratings-contingent financial regulation on foreign bank lending behavior. We examine the sensitivity of international bank flows to debtor countries’ sovereign credit rating changes before and after the implementation of the Basel 2 risk-based capital...

In this paper we study how the introduction of the euro has affected corporate financing in Europe. We use firm-level data from eleven euro area countries as well as from a control group of five other European countries spanning the years 1991–2006. We show that firms from euro area countries...

We use a two-country monetary model with unionized labor markets and open-economy spillovers to study the macroeconomic consequences of the formation of a monetary union. It is shown that the monetary regime affects the trade-off between real consumer wages and employment faced by the unions....

Differences in growth, productivity and inflation levels are going to be a prominent feature of the future of EMU, as the convergence process is still on-going in the new Member States. This convergence process can be described by the Balassa-Samuelson proposition, which states that faster...

This is the first paper that examines economies of scale in stock exchanges. The data employed in the study include cost and output statistics for 37 stock exchanges in four continents around the world for the year 1997. I estimate two traditional cost functions and find that ray (overall) scale...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates into a standard inflation forecast targeting framework. Learning about the transmission process of monetary policy is introduced by having heterogeneous agents – ie central bank and private agents – who have different...

In this paper we analyse disinflation policy in two environments. In the first, the central bank has perfect knowledge, in the sense that it understands and observes the process by which private sector inflation expectations are generated; in the second, the central bank has to learn the private...

It is commonly thought that an open economy can accommodate output shocks through either exchange rate or real sector adjustments. We formalise this notion by incorporating labour market rigidities into an 'escape clause' model of currency crises. We show that the absence of structural reform...